


Cold Blades, Chilled Fingers

by TheTartWitch



Series: Mass Transit/The Gathering of the Fandoms [1]
Category: D. Gray-man, Naruto, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: All on one world, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Elves, F/F, F/M, Faeries - Freeform, Fai's twin survives, M/M, My OTPs, No destruction of Celes, Prophetic Visions, Reincarnation, no character tags until someone guesses their real names, unfair prosecution, witch-burning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-16 16:52:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4632834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A group of children are sprinkled throughout the medieval world and pertain to a destiny Earth just wishes it had. Destruction will bring ashes and dust, and that dust becomes human and Chaos. But sometimes Chaos is the only way to win an uneven fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Snake-Eye

It’s a late winter this year; just enough of a lag to create a safe opportunity for the birth of a boy who will walk the path his people have forgotten- but perhaps he’s too early. These people do not need him.

He’s a small child, with long black hair and sparkling black eyes. His mother is alone, left behind by a man too quick in rushing to his death. They live atop a small hill at the edge of the village farthest to the West Wood’s newest line of trees. Sometimes the boy swears he can hear birdsong mixed with the whistles of elves, perhaps faeries, but he wouldn’t _swear_ on it, even if you could get him to speak aloud.

He’s a young age when the visions begin: images of himself, older, grown, clapping hands with tall, spindly figures with pointed ears and cat-slit eyes. His mother cries when he describes how he himself is different: white hair, blood-red eyes, a long, spiny scar-bruise looping around his entire body like binds and leaving its snake-head on his left cheek.

They hide the visions from the villagers for another year before a neighboring girl finds the boy convulsing behind the goat-shed, covered in mud and drooling, eyes rolling and pained whimpers escaping clenched cheeks. She screams. The boy is found, his mother grabbed as well. She is accused of being a witch, a sorceress who has summoned a demon to reside within her child and curse them all. The boy cries, great dripping tears leaking from his eyes as he begs for them to understand, attempts to explain everything. No one listens. No one understands.

His mother is hanged in the central square, her empty body hanging for days until the villagers are satisfied every bit of evil magic is gone and they take the husk down.

The boy is silent, even as he is charged with death and sent to drown in a pot of cruddy water. The girl who found him is watching, eyes wide and trembling hands secured over her wilting mouth. He smiles for her, a gash across his face that should, for all purposes, be bleeding.

It’s not.

Water flows down his dusty cheeks, into the muddy pot they’re going to smother his breath into. He stares into it, wondering what it will look like when he’s gone. Would the essence of his soul make it cloudy? Purify it? Or would it be just as dirty and choked with filth as it always was, as he soon will be?

He feels the village’s strongest man grip the back of his head in a fist and closes his eyes, prepared for the empty pretense of struggle and a hollow justice. Victory and murder, in the name of a god who may not even exist.

There’s a thudding sound, and the grip loosens. His eyes fly open, right into the liquid silver of an elf. The sly smile etched across the creature’s face is wide and exhilarated as it breathes, _“Ready to go yet, little one?”_

The village burns bright that night.

(0)


	2. Longfinger, Twitchtoe, and Letterlighter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Longfinger's backstory, partially the backstory of two other characters.

Longfinger says that humans don't understand the rituals of the elves and thus dub them as evil or demonic, such as the visions adolescent elves receive when their ears grow out and their eyes slit, like a precursor for the elf blood to show itself physically. He says Snake-Eye  (the boy's new name is accurate, seeing as his visions came true in the form of an elven sickness that left him with a serpentine scar-bruise) may go wherever he likes and is not confined to the forest. Snake-Eye stays and watches the girl from the forest, naming her in his head. He practices the elven art of healing, marveling at his elongated lifespan and the glassy quality he can see in most human's eyes. The ones without it are part elf, he learns, but they never received their visions and walk on in a facsimile of the life they could have had.  
Longfinger warns him that some of the elves are less accepting of questions on their human lives and will not appreciate that way of getting to know them. He tells Snake-Eye his own story as an example. Snake-Eye listens in fascination and growing pain for his friend.  
(0)  
There is a city, far from the coast and settled quite comfortably in the shadow of its own smog, that is much like Snake-Eye's own village in terms of acceptance.   
Longfinger's arm was not as beautiful and streamline back then as it is now, long needle-like arcs of black glass. It is slender and breathtakingly graceful, strong enough to catch teenagers falling from trees in one hand. It becomes a sword when Longfinger needs a weapon, though he prefers to use his throwing darts in a fight.  
Back then, maybe fifty years ago (and here Snake-Eye trembles to think his petite (for an elf) friend is at least forty years older than him), it was clunky and blister red, frightening to the average citizen of the city Longfinger inhabited. He'd had a different name then, something short and modern and hollow. His mother had called him a devil and tossed him out, so that his visions began early, his body sensing his predicament and jumpstarting the process.    
He was drawn to the forest by his instincts, knowing the humans would hate him even more with his cat's eyes and snake's tongue. His pointed ears were too long to be hidden, so that was an issue even before his eyes or tongue.  
He met friends there, a boy and girl who swore their mates, the voices in their soulsongs were in that city, walking and breathing and laughing. But they were young, and full of sunlight and soft grass and long thick tree branches that lifted them to the sky and higher and so didn't know of the way of the world of elves.  
They found their mates buried under the grime and rubble of a collapsing city the following summer, while a massive earthquake ripped the building and streets in two and turned to stone where they stood, as elves always have.   
When a mate dies before it's time, it's elf will turn to stone to be preserved for when the mate returns to this earth.  
Longfinger dragged them to the safety of the woods and watched as the trees and bushes curled gnarled roots and scented flowers around their feet and climbed upwards, into their hair and illuminating their now-grey eyes.  
This city is nought but a dream now, an empty waste of fallen cement and toppled skyscrapers, but Longfinger says it was beautiful once, as beautiful as humans can get.  
(0)  
"And what were their names?" Snake-Eye squeals excitedly, bouncing on his stump like a small child. Longfinger smiles at him, tired but indulgent, and murmurs, "Twitchtoe and Letterlighter. Perhaps someday I'll take you to see them, hm?"  
And then he steps away, that elven grace apparent as he sways around trees and ducks under branches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> same deal, guys! guess one character and get one pairing added. i plan to have at least eight, but other characters could get a spin-off spot!  
> and sorry, Alaera, but you already guessed last chapter so you can't guess here!  
> i know it's short, guys, but it's forward progress, right? it's a new chapter, right??


	3. Birdfeather and Spiderleg

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a city far away there sits a kingdom on a tall rock, and beside it a Valley of Monotone in which twins are imprisoned...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same rule applies, people. Guess a character, get a pairing. :)

In the village closest to the North Sea and cradled in the high arms of frosted mountains, there is a king. He is king of the low-lying valley within the mountain walls and is happily married to his wife, a kind woman her people call Queen Chi. She is often painted smiling, though it is a melancholy smile.

She has been pregnant for nine months now and tonight the child is ready to come out. She gives birth peacefully, amid safe company and comforting sounds, to a pair of twins.

There is a legend that twins will save this kingdom from something that is most certain imminent disaster. What that disaster is, legend does not say.

(0)

The twins are five years old now, and the disaster is rearing its black mane and cat-calling at the edges of their castle walls. The citizens outside it are beyond help, and the king stares down at his small sons with a mixture of hope, envy, and hatred, for were it not for the rumors of his children's beauty, there would be no intruder and no potential fight for the old king's life.

"Go!" He demands, waving a regal palm towards the shuddering door. "Go, and save my people!" They are no longer his children. They are his soldiers, bred by destiny for a war they are not yet old enough for. He would waste them on this petty fight easily, with no remorse or pity.

Nearby, their mother clutched her skirts in her white-knuckled fists.

"No." She murmurs as soldiers lead the two blank-eyed children to the front doors, through pillars of sobbing women and glaring men.

The King's eyes turn to her, the incredulous hatred burning in them only getting stronger at the sight of her. "No! Do not send my children to fight for this horrid man, who would kill his own blood simply because it is not _all of it_ his blood!" The Queen's fists unclenched and drew away from her frilled dress with short knuckle daggers held strongly inside. Her eyes glowed and her ears elongated, and she leapt at the king with flared nostrils, ignoring the human guards in her way. 

The elven lady leaps for vengeance but never quite makes it to her target. An arrow protrudes grotesquely from her chest as she gurgles and lands wrong, her ankles giving out beneath her as she wobbles. A bubble of blood explodes on her lips and the king snarls.

“You idiots! How are we going to maintain peace with the elven tribes when they hear we’ve killed one of their own?!” The guards blanched in panic and the twins’ eyes went wide. Before any of the company can stop them, they dash to their mother’s body and both take one of her knuckleduster knives, hiding it beneath their robes. Even as they’re dragged away by concerned guards and a king who’s fighting off people who thought, once, that he loved his family.

The king pushes them off and decrees, “For the safety of the kingdom and its citizens, I will announce that the twin princes killed their mother upon discovering her elven blood and will be locked away in the tallest tower we have, to never again touch the ground she walked upon! Then we will be safe!”

A majority of the crowd cheers, swept up in the hysteria of the impending war with the elves. The others look on, horrified.

The princes turn to each other, eyes and slender hands linking. Their faces set: solemn and quiet, with that muted flash of loss still sparkling.

It is done.

(0)

They are much older in mind, but their bodies have yet to age a day. In this tower so far away from anything, they do not eat, age, or die. Their fingers are chapped and frostbitten, their eyes are growing dull from the lack of sunlight and the excess of shadows, and they are kept separately to prevent escape, so they don’t notice the changes to themselves, and aren’t there to tell the other of the changes to their body. They mistake the visions of elfhood for the delusions of the imprisoned and disregard the way their ears and fingers grow long and pointed, their legs and hips slender and willowy as a tree’s, and their eyes glow and slit into cat’s-eyes.

They wait in that tower, sitting like forgotten dolls in the Valley of Monotone. They wait tirelessly until a small window opens and a smiling man with long black hair sticks a hand through and invites them to leave with him.

They grasp that hand and use it to tug themselves out of the Valley and into the welcoming embrace of a new life, a new country.

-*-


End file.
